Sometimes mental wellness can feel like a slippery fish, here one minute and disappearing into murky waters the next. Where did the lovely little fish of health, moving with fluidity and grace, with assuredness and well-being, go exactly? 2020 debited quite a bit from the "energy and emotional bank", but after a history of struggles…
The Internet: Oasis or Inferno?
**Skip to the end for a request of you, dear readers and internet-goers.** The internet is the place to be, and it has been for a while. But has it started to feel like there are only a few places to go on the internet? Like you cycle between one site and another in a…
Viewing Rivers and All of the Natural World More Widely
Reasons to pick up compelling memoirs of river journeys by Darcy Gaechter and Ellen McDonah and more outdoor travel memoirs.
A Cry for Elpy
Yes, it’s been a weird year, but a lot of great books for young people were still published, and the American Library Association just gave out its annual awards to the best of them. We have compiled full lists of all the winners and honorees in print, as well as ebook and digital audio formats…
Swimming Through the Library
"It's dreary in this world, ladies and gentlemen." (And yet): "Marvelous is the working of our world!" So wrote Nikolai Gogol, and so ends A Swim in A Pond in the Rain, George Saunders' new book on writing, reading, and life, via a handful of Russian stories. I wish I had known, in 2017 when…
Putting the Roles in Role-playing
The year 2020 brought a lot of things that really sucked, but one thing that was good was my re-introduction to Dungeons and Dragons. I had played before, years and years ago, but my work as the event coordinator here at Lawrence Public Library changed pace precipitously, and there were no longer movies to go…
If the Lies Don’t Kill You
There seem to be two kinds of speculative fiction readers these days. (And by these days I mean the ones rife with political unrest the likes of which my generation has never witnessed and oh, also the raging pandemic.) Ones who are still hankering to be transported to a post apocalyptic future and ones who…
Forget What You Think You Know About Poetry
If you tuned into this year’s presidential inauguration, you may now have major heart-eyes for Amanda Gorman, the 22-year-old National Youth Poet Laureate who stole the show as she read her free verse poem, “The Hill We Climb.”
1 - 8 of 8
